


grew up safe

by the_ponds



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Gen, a drift feelings fic, love 2 dive into the brain of a guy you haven't seen since you were fourteen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-16
Updated: 2020-07-16
Packaged: 2021-03-05 05:55:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,543
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25299472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_ponds/pseuds/the_ponds
Summary: Jake came out of the drift not sure if the pain of falling on his arm and feeling it snap was his or Nate’s, if he’d lived on a lake or in a small city apartment, if his father was teaching him to drive when he left for the academy or if the only time he’d seen his father in months was in uniform on a news broadcast.
Relationships: Nate Lambert & Jake Pentecost
Comments: 1
Kudos: 15





	grew up safe

**Author's Note:**

> fragments of a pacific rim 2 canon-divergent au, of sorts, that i work on approx once a year and will probably never finish. the canon-divergent part is me completely ignoring the ""plot"" of pacific rim 2 and honing in on the vibe of two people who learned to drift together as teens spending a decade-plus without that relationship coming back to it embittered and indoctrinated and traumatized and and and - etc. - but really everything here fits with canon just fine. there's no real plot, i just like to write about memories.

Jake didn’t want to tell Nate how much he’d missed his voice in Jake’s head in the months and weeks after Jake was kicked out. How much he’d missed the feeling of drifting with him, the rush of Nate’s bright memories against his own. The memories always changed, but a few showed up nearly every time they drifted, since the first time Jake saw them when he was fourteen and Nate fifteen. He’d watched them monthly, weekly, sometimes daily as they trained—Nate climbing a tree by the house on the lake and slipping and falling, three little sisters trailing him like ducklings as he taught them to swim, getting drunk for the first time and ending up puking and puking in the bushes half a mile from the house—

Jake had made fun of him endlessly for his perfect, peaceful life. Nate had grown up rich and safe, in the middle of the United States, a couple thousand miles from danger. He’d been four or five when the first attack happened, Jake couldn’t remember, and neither of them could remember much of the time before the war. But Nate—he’d never been close enough to the ocean to need to feel that fear of what might come out of it. And he hadn’t grown up the way Jake had, safe in a suburb of London but knowing whenever the news turned to the shaky camera footage of monsters and giant mechs that his father was there, somewhere. With a dead aunt and an orphaned survivor for a sister and an endless stream of whispered arguments just out of Jake’s earshot.

He couldn’t imagine how Nate felt about the memories Jake had given him. Nate had teased him for the ones about his father—the hero of the war lifting baby Jake up in the air or the tantrums he’d thrown when his father would have to leave again—until he’d learned to drop it. But Jake knew his head was a mess of resentment and fear and bravado and trying too hard to prove himself and he’d let himself, for a while, take comfort in feeling Nate’s memories as close to the surface as his own. He’d let himself imagine who he might have been if he’d had that, the quiet Midwestern life with the perfect family and all that distance, insulated from the war and its effects as Jake had never been able to be.

Not that Nate had been insulated, really. That had been one of the hardest things for Jake to understand about him—that he had grown up untouched by the war but fixated on it anyway. He’d watched every interview with every jaeger pilot and filled up his bedroom with plastic toys of kaiju and did every school report that he could on the war. And after Anchorage, after things started deteriorating, he’d only become more sure of his desire to join the war, to be one of the heroes who turned the tide back against the kaiju and saved the world. He’d joined up less than two years after Anchorage and a handful of months after Jake, a fourteen-year-old high school dropout with the kind of childish confidence that had infuriated and charmed Jake in equal measure.

It was hard to remember, then and now, just how much of Nate’s life Jake knew from talking to him and how much he’d gleaned from the drift, more instinct that knowledge. They hadn’t been close before they drifted together. They’d known each other, sure, couldn’t avoid it even in a base the size of the Hong Kong Shatterdome, but Jake had been a little younger and a lot more famous, the shadow of not just his father but Mako, already holding every record in the academy even a year before she would graduate, hanging over him. They’d argued more often than they’d talked, fought on occasion in training, each trying too hard to prove themselves the real star of the program. But Jake never guessed that they would be drift compatible until they were paired together in trials—the third cadet Jake tried to drift with, to no success—and the drift started. Until Jake came out of the drift not sure if the pain of falling on his arm and feeling it snap was his or Nate’s, if he’d lived on a lake or in a small city apartment, if his father was teaching him to drive when he left for the academy or if the only time he’d seen his father in months was in uniform on a news broadcast.

Jake would never have admitted it out loud back then, but after the first time they drifted together, it became clear that he and Nate were nowhere near as different as he’d imagined. They’d both grown up with the same goal—to be a hero, to prove themselves. And while Nate had come at it from seemingly nowhere—out of a perfect, peaceful life in the middle of nowhere—that hadn’t made him any less single-minded about his goal than Jake. Nate was the only one of his siblings who could remember, however vaguely, the day of the San Francisco attack—when the oldest of his sisters was still a baby, when his mother had held her and stopped responding to Nate’s confused questions and just stared at the television, watching the reporters trying and failing to make sense of what was happening. He was the only one who remembered what it was like for the threat of the kaiju to be new and bewildering, to watch as the world remade itself in response—even Jake, just a year younger, could barely remember it the way Nate could. Nate may have grown up safe, but they’d both grown up scared—and determined.

\---

The first time they drifted together at Moyulan, Jake didn’t know what to expect. The exact memories that came through in the drift, in the first rush of feelings and images, were always changing, but Jake had memorized the cadence of Nate’s memories back in their Academy days. Now, more than ten years later, Jake couldn’t guess if Nate’s mind would feel like a stranger’s again.

Worse, he didn’t know how his own mind would sit in the drift. Last time he’d done this, he had been fourteen. The war had still been dragging on with no sign of stopping and Jake himself was hurtling towards a posting as a pilot. Last time he’d drifted, his father had still been alive.

“You remember how this goes?” Nate asked. Jake shot him his best winning smile as he plugged himself into the right side of the jaeger; a decade ago, connecting his suit would’ve taken three techs and ten minutes to do what he could finish in three on his own now.

“They turn this thing on and you know what I had for breakfast last week,” Jake said. “I remember.”

When they were both hooked in and settled, the LOCCENT counted them down in their earpieces.

“Initiating drift sequence in three…two…one…”

Jake braced himself against the drift like it was a physical blow. The first rush of memories came too fast for Jake to sort through, a mess of color and sensation—the fleeting smell of his primary school cafeteria, the brush of cool grass against his bare feet, a voice he half-remembered that was lost back to the drift before he could place it.

The first memory he saw clearly was his own—walking out of his bedroom to see his father standing behind the couch, joy blooming in his chest because it had been months since Jake had seen him, then confusion when he saw the girl he did not recognize sitting on their couch—

—and waking up, first in a hospital bed at fifteen, then face-first on a lawn he didn’t recognize at twenty-three, then back in his childhood bedroom and not remembering why he was there, why he wasn’t in the barracks bunk he’d grown familiar with over three years—

—and the cool of a lake in summertime breaking over him—

Jake felt their drift connection hitch as a sudden wave of nausea hit him. It passed as quickly as it came and their connection stabilized again—he wasn’t even sure if Nate had noticed—but Jake couldn’t believe the force with which the memory had hit him. He had never seen that lake with his own eyes, but he knew it, had felt the sharp cold of its water hit him a hundred times before. It was like some distant part of his mind was finally waking up again, missing piece clicking into place—he had been missing this memory for a decade and he didn’t know how he hadn’t noticed its absence until now.

It all washed over him in a matter of seconds. When he looked up, Jake met Nate’s eyes across the cockpit. Something in his eyes held Jake’s gaze there for a long moment, as the sensors lit up across the HUD in front of them, confirming that their drift connection was clear. Neither of them said anything until their earpieces lit up with chatter a moment later.

“Drift is strong and holding.”

**Author's Note:**

> i am very committed 2 staying true to pacrim canon but a) pacrim canon is a joke, at least where timelines are concerned, and b) if i have to read the comics 2 have a full grasp on canon, then the canon doesn't deserve to be understood.
> 
> tldr if we actually know more abt nate's backstory than i realized then SORRY and also i don't CARE we're here to goof off and write about robots and sad boys, thank u for your time.
> 
> i have a few more fragments that i might try to pull together and post, but this fic will always live more in my head than on paper, i think!


End file.
